Brace yourself for a knockout

Published: Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 8:58 p.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, April 6, 2013 at 8:58 p.m.

Terrebonne and Lafourche residents should prepare themselves to make the kind of heart-wrenching decisions their neighbors to the east are now confronting.

Thousands of home and business owners can expect flood-insurance prices to rise to outrageously unaffordable levels. The choices:

-- Pay costs that in some of the lowest-lying areas could exceed $20,000 a year for a flood-insurance policy. Even those who live in less-risky areas could see major increases, with insurance policies that now cost a few hundred dollars a year rising to a few thousand dollars a year.

-- Pay tens of thousands of dollars to elevate, though even after that, people who live in some of the highest-risk areas would still have to pay intolerable flood-insurance costs.

-- Go without flood insurance and face the prospect of losing everything you own, with no insurance money to rebuild, to the next flood or hurricane storm surge.

-- Move to higher ground, wherever that might end up being after FEMA releases its new flood-risk maps for Louisiana’s coastal parishes. But first, face the prospect that your home, the one you’ll need to sell to get the money you’ll need to move, will be rendered almost worthless because skyrocketing flood-insurance prices will push down property values and make things just as difficult for someone who might consider buying it.

Residents are already confronting this grim future in St. Charles, Plaquemines, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes, where FEMA, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program, is rolling out the new maps. I’ve been following media reports of the public hearings where residents are coming to grips with the magnitude of what lies ahead. Here, as reported by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, is a sampling of reactions at a March 25 hearing in Des Allemands, right across the border from Lafourche:

-- “They should call this death to Des Allemands,” Bayou Gauche resident Charles Boyer II said after reviewing the maps and their effects on insurance prices.

-- “My whole life savings is gone,” said Annie Knuppel, of Des Allemands, whose home, three feet off the ground, is still four feet below base flood elevation under the new maps. “I pay $350 now. They told me I’ll have to pay $15,000. That means either foreclosure or bankruptcy for me. And my parents — my daddy’s house is 3 feet under now. … He’s in hospice dying of cancer, they’re living on fixed income with no savings, and now they’re going to lose their house, too.”

-- “These maps will benefit some, but devastate — not hurt, devastate — others to the point where people will lose their houses,” said St. Charles Parish Councilman Paul J. Hogan, whose district includes some of the hardest hit areas along the west bank of the Mississippi River. “People with mortgages will have to pay $20,000 per year. The banks will foreclose on these houses, and these areas will become ghost towns.”

These heart-breaking realizations are destined to impact thousands of residents in Terrebonne and Lafourche, where local officials say they expect the maps to be released later this year.

Residents have known the maps were coming for years. They will replace maps that haven’t been updated since the mid-1980s, and parish officials have spent months disputing some of the elevation calculations on which they are based.

But the maps are only the left jab of a devastating two-pronged blow. The right hook — the knockout punch — is called the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform and Modernization Act of 2012. Its goal is to put the National Flood Insurance Program on solid financial footing. The program has run up an estimated $27 billion debt since Hurricane Katrina and subsequent storms, and officials estimate it takes in only 70 cents for every dollar it pays out in property-damage claims.

Before it was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama, FEMA had planned to allow anyone who already had flood insurance when the new maps took effect to keep paying the lower rates that are now subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. But the new law, which takes effect later this year, will eliminate such “grandfathering” for people who live in the most flood-prone areas.

Where those areas will be in Terrebonne and Lafourche, and how high insurance prices will rise for home and business owners there, is impossible to determine until FEMA releases the new maps to the public. But if what is happening just to the east is any indication, areas south of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway would be the most likely to see the biggest rate hikes.

Add to those blows a kick below the belt: The Army Corps of Engineers rates none of the levees in Terrebonne or Lafourche parishes as hurricane protection under the stricter standards enacted after Katrina in 2005. So FEMA is crafting the maps as if the levees don’t exist. That decision raises the flood risk significantly in most of the two parishes, exacerbating the skyrocketing prices residents will soon face.

All of this poses grave consequences for every single person who lives and works in Terrebonne and Lafourche, across south Louisiana and in other coastal communities across America. The effects on home and business owners in the lowest-lying areas are painfully obvious. But imagine how this will impact the whole community economically and socially. Unfortunately, it appears, we won’t have to imagine much longer.

Courier and Daily Comet Executive Editor Keith Magill can be reached at 857-2201 or keith.magill@houmatoday.com.

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